Berlin and Berthoff

James Berlin’s essay considers the four dominant composition theories—the Neo-Aristotelians or Classicists, the Positivists or Current-Traditionalists, the Neo-Platonists or Expressionists, and the New Rhetoricians—and the way writer, audience, reality, and language are constructed with the rules for communicating knowledge and truth. Completing the assigned chart greatly assisted in grasping the similarities and differences between the composition theories and making note of the overlaps as well as in understanding how each element plays a role in the scope of each theory.

I found Berlin’s statement regarding teachers’ methods toward writing when discussing/teaching it to their students most interesting. She writes: “The dismay students display about writing is, I am convinced, at least occasionally the result of teachers unconsciously offering contradictory advice about composing” (766). Reflecting on my own elementary education (from elementary through high school), I cannot help but to agree with Berlin. I recall hearing (or being preached to, rather) a platter of information and how-to tutorials regarding writing, including: the five paragraph essay, the “never start a sentence with ‘because,’” and the “show your intelligence with your choice in vocabulary” (aka, go to dictionary.com and find a convoluted synonym for a simplistic word). The rules changed grade after grade, year after year; finally, in college we were instructed to throw these “guidelines” out the window and compose in a different light. Perhaps teachers were, like Berlin suggests, “tacitly teaching a version of reality and the student’s place and mode of operation in it” based upon age group and class cohort. If teachers teach to the books and various standardized tests, they unconsciously offer information that will shortly become outdated or revised with new information, new criteria from a new teacher based on that particular grade and its curriculum. Berlin’s reasoning would explain my struggle to understand the norm for writing in my elementary years.

 Berlin discusses Francis Genung’s branches of discourses: fundamental, description, narrative, and oratory. These seem to parallel the four modes of discourse that James Kinneavy discusses in chapter one of his work Writing—Basic Modes of Organization. Kinneavy writes how the four modes of discourse—classification, description, narration, and evaluation—offer four different views of reality. He writes: “It follows the notion that any one mode gives only a partial account of reality, that each mode needs to be supplemented by the other modes to make any pretense to a full account” (Kinneavy 9). This parallels similar points Berlin makes about the realities of each of the four composition theories as well as the reality that is communicated and taught to students in the classroom. Berlin even mentions the implications of certain realities, and writes: “…college students are encouraged to embrace a view of reality based on a mechanistic physics and a naïve faculty psychology—and all in the name of a convenient pedagogy” (771).

It was slightly refreshing to revisit Kenneth Burke and some of his thoughts. Having taken an extensive look at Burke’s work in Dr. Barnett’s rhetoric course last semester, and now having retouched some of the themes within Berlin’s essay, I can now establish appropriate connections between the works and the ideas that Berlin incorporates as evidence of his claims. This same thought holds true for that of Plato and Aristotle and their works, as well. The classificatory and descriptive nature of Berlin’s work helps further develop my understanding of these rhetoricians’ works. Most importantly, however, was my witnessing the relationship of these works to teaching writing in the classroom and how the elements play vital roles in obtaining knowledge and communicating realities.   

I also enjoyed the connection Berlin makes to Ann Berthoff’s writing. In the passage Berlin quotes, Berthoff talks about “seeing relationships.” I connected the ideas described in this passage with a recent lecture in ENGL 856: Workplace Communication. In “Metaphors of Communication and Organization,” Putnam et al. introduce the seven metaphors within organizational communication: conduit, lens, voice, performance, symbol, linkage, and discourse. A metaphor is a linkage between something that is familiar versus something that is unfamiliar, and according to Berthoff, “the way we make sense of the world is to see something with respect to, in terms of, in relation to something else” (Berlin 775). We understand things and form realities based upon these metaphors, and this understanding is relevant in the classroom and in composition: “We are teaching a way of experiencing the world, a way or ordering and making sense of it…and even style are assumptions about the nature of reality” (Berlin 776). In her essay, “Is Teaching Still Possible? Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning,” Berthoff furthers this idea of the metaphor in relationship to the movement in pedagogy. She provides an example: “A positivist conception of language as a ‘communication medium,’ as a set of muffin tins into which the batter of thought is poured, leads to question-begging representations and models of the composing process” (744). By using the familiar (e.g., the muffin tins and the batter) in combination with the unfamiliar (e.g., positivist conception of language), Berthoff successfully explains the idea within pedagogy.